JPL worker counts down toward a writing career

For decades, Jean Walker’s writing career existed only between shifts at La Cañada’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and family dinners. She’d scribble notes after putting her two young daughters to bed, ideas for romance novels flying through her head so fast she could hardly get them down.

And for a while that routine sufficed, with Walker producing a couple of romances with a science fiction or paranormal bent to them. But it wasn’t until 2011, when she submitted an Egyptian romance set in ancient times to the slush pile of Carina Press, a digitally based division of romance giant Harlequin Enterprises, and got published, that the Montrose resident began to envision a career in romance writing.

“You never think it’s going to happen this way,” she said. “It’s a lot of serendipity.”

Today, Walker has published and self-published several titles under the pen name Veronica Scott. She makes regular contributions to USA Today’s “Happily Ever After” romance blog and has gained a respectable following in the genre. In two weeks, she ends 35 years of service as a contract worker and supervisor at JPL, retiring to focus on writing full time.

As Veronica Scott, Walker joins several romance authors set to appear this evening at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse for a panel discussion and book signing event at 7 p.m. Other authors include: Linda O. Johnston, moderator; Celia Bonaduce; Lorenz Font and Nicola Italia.

The event is one of many regular appearances Walker has made to promote the seven titles she’s written so far, and the one she’s working on now. Though the themes range from futuristic and paranormal to ancient and slightly historical, they’re all romance, Walker says, confessing the genre is a true love of hers.

“I don’t tell stories that don’t have romance in them,” she said. “I don’t know why, it’s just my thing. There has to be romance… the element of the man and woman falling in love.”

Though the ideas for books and their execution come easily — it takes her about three to four months to write one with the full-time job — the author admits she does get a little help from youngest daughter Beth Walker, who published her own first novel in 2005.

When she was a young girl, Beth Walker said, she was inspired by her mom’s scribbling away whenever an opportunity presented itself and decided she wanted to try her hand at writing.

“She’d always be writing when I was a kid,” she recalled of her mother’s early endeavors. “She had been since she first married my dad, but when he passed away (in 1988), she let it go for awhile. She was raising two small kids all by herself.”

Beth Walker says she’s glad her mother is retiring to write full time, and believes with her growing fan base, she could become even more successful.

“It will be great for her to write every day,” the 30-year-old Walker added. “She has an established fan base and it will grow. I think she’s really positioned to break out in a really big way.”

Imagining Jean Walker as a breakout romance author was a little harder for her co-workers at JPL. When rumors began to circulate around the water cooler that mild-mannered Jean Walker wrote steamy romance novels under the name Veronica Scott, some of her co-workers doubted their veracity.

Longtime friend and JPL colleague Bill Kert admits he was one of the early doubters.

“In all that time, I would never have guessed that Jean would write romantic fantasy,” Kert said in an email interview. “Jean is many things — competent, professional, friendly — but an author of ‘spicy’ romantic fiction? No way!”

Jean Walker says while she will miss JPL, she’s excited to see what happens when she commits herself fully to authorship. To budding authors of any genre, she imparted some words of advice.

“You have to write,” she said. “You have to get the words on the page. Because if you never start, you’ll never finish.”